Inequality

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 10 of a 10-part Series:

What Are We To Do?

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.”

Hannah Arendt

We might ask ourselves whether America is a pathocracy—or might have been a pathocracy on January 6th? I believe we can safely say that America has never been a full pathocracy like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, but has, at various points, demonstrated elements of pathocratic tendencies. Leaving aside the sordid issue of slavery, historical examples are the forced migration of Native Americans and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. More recently, we had official Dept. of Justice documents supporting the torture of detainees in Guantanamo (2003) and the inhumane treatment of migrants at the U.S. border, particularly children. At the local level, I have completely lost count of the number of unarmed Black people killed by police. 

As much as Americans convince themselves of their own exceptionalism, we are nonetheless subject to the same dark side of human nature as everyone else. However, we have avoided becoming a full-blown pathocracy because most of the aforementioned atrocities were eventually subject to popular backlash, investigations, and (sometimes) accountability. The January 6th coup attempt itself was prevented because there were honorable persons still occupying positions of power. Regardless of our own opinions of these individuals, the coup was unsuccessful because former Vice President Pence refused to do anything other than his duty to count the Electoral votes. Election officials in Georgia, Arizona and other states refused to submit to Trump’s threats and certified a valid election. Republican-appointed judges (some appointed by Trump himself) upheld the rule of law. If any one of these individuals had been dishonorable, we would likely not be living in the free United States of America anymore. Fortunately, legislators and other pro-democracy groups are working on “fixes” to our antiquated electoral system to prevent another January 6th-like coup attempt from happening again. 

Although America has not succumbed to a full-blown pathocracy, we seem to be at an unusually high point in a “hysteroidal cycle” (to use Lobaszewsky’s term). A sizeable minority of the population continues to subscribe to the Big Lie that Trump used to perpetuate his coup attempt, and a lot of media (right wing outlets and social media) continue to feed it. Even the right-wing oligarchs who stoked and fed the anger that ultimately resulted in January 6th admit they may have created a monster they can no longer control. Shortly after the 2020 election, Charles Koch admits to “screwing up” —and this was before January 6th 

A significant percentage of the US population subscribes to either (or both) Q-Anon and election denial, which represents a disconnection from the reality that most of the rest of us live in. Cult deprogrammers have been overwhelmed with requests for help from family members concerned about one of their own who has gone down the rabbit hole. Most of us simply do not have the skills and training to deal with this level of delusion. Logic, along with arguments about facts and evidence will not work. Rather, the strategy is to help these folks re-learn to think for themselves and connect the dots using a form of “reverse engineering” of the same tactics that led them into the cult. These folks must be able to see a way back to their old lives, which will never happen if they are confronted with shame and humiliation.

 

In order to heal and recover from a pathocracy, Lobaszewsky advises us to build a society based on an equitable distribution of resources; to promote education, particularly education about the human capacity for evil; and to encourage the formation of social bonds across diverse groups. Ironically, Lobaszewsky urges us to refrain from “moralizing,” but rather view evil from the dispassionate position that it will always be with us and the best we can do is to understand and manage it.  

In essence, we will have to build solidarity out of the post-January 6th remains of a tattered social fabric and a dis-United States of America. It is an understatement to say that this will be hard to do. When doing his own research into the nature of macrosocial evil, Lobaszewsky reported having to suppress his own revulsion and “moralizing impulses” to maintain scientific objectivity. He admits that his training in psychiatry (which most of us don’t have) helped him with this. How can we re-connect people back to reality and the fundamentals of prosocial thinking—especially if they hate us? If we only return the hate, then the dark side will have prevailed.

We can begin by recognizing that many (but not all) of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th are both perpetrators and victims. I personally will probably never find it within myself to forgive the people who planned the coup and knew the “Big Lie” for what it was but continued to push it anyway. Easier to forgive are the folks who simply voted for Trump—perhaps they did not follow politics closely or habitually voted Republican no matter who the candidate was. A little harder (but not impossible) to forgive are those who continued to support Trump even in the face of overwhelming evidence of corruption. Here, the issue of blameworthiness depends on how much of the delusion is the result of willful ignorance (I have to believe Trump is right because he gives me permission to hate the people I don’t like). 

The hardest thing we will have to confront is the huge propaganda machine that continues to poison individual minds and our body politic to this day. The oligarchs are still pumping it out, but now they have been joined by hostile foreign governments, who now have all the evidence they need that America can be destroyed by disinformation. Disinformation that taps into the darkest recesses of the human limbic brain. Disinformation that makes the media oligarchs richer. Disinformation that keeps the rest of us divided, not just on values, but on the very definition of reality. America can be brought to its knees without firing a single missile or sending a single soldier, because Americans can be made to do it to themselves and each other.

Holding those responsible for January 6th accountable to the law and fixing the loopholes in our electoral system is a good start—but it is only a start. The dark side of human nature (what some religions term “original sin”) is probably something we will never be able to fix. But we can come up with ways to contain it. We certainly should be able to find ways to structure society where we don’t reward it. Perhaps we could require some sort of character test (complete with documented history) for every candidate for public office above a certain level. Perhaps we could articulate limits to the First Amendment, permitting (well-defined and narrowly tailored) restrictions on speech that is both false and provably harmful to public health. 

We stand at a crucial juncture in humanity’s history. I do not know what the result will be. But somewhere, a butterfly flaps its wings.

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 6 of a 10-part Series:

The Double-edged Sword of Populism

There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed…For this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. “

Richard Hofstadter, 1963,  Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Populism is a political movement that purports to champion the “common person” against a real or perceived elite that exerts an inordinate amount of power over the life of everyday people. The paradox of populism is that it can come from either the right (anti-government) or the left (anti-corporate), and its effects can be either progressive or regressive.

Populism often arises in response to real injustice, but then may morph into something darker as it gains power. A good example of this is the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution. It was formed by mostly middle and upper-middle class persons, and its goal was to preserve the gains of the revolution by preventing a reactionary backlash from the aristocratic elites. The Jacobins increased their membership by recruiting lower-middle-class shopkeepers and artisans, and they became increasingly radicalized. During the trial of King Louis XIV, moderates who opposed violence were excluded from the club. What followed was the Reign of Terror, where many people were publicly executed. The Jacobins were blamed, and they were eventually abolished.

Here in America, perhaps the earliest example of populism was Shay’s Rebellion in 1786-1787. A group of farmers who were subject to bank foreclosure violently stormed courthouses in Massachusetts. The governing authorities in some states (who were comprised of elites) were concerned whether they would be able to suppress future such rebellions themselves. Shay’s rebellion was the event that motivated the American Constitutional convention (May-September 1787). A national government would allow the states to combine defenses against future challenges to “property.”

Later populism in America was associated with the Progressive era (1877-1917). This was the period characterized by the ascendance of industrialism, the growth of monopolies, and rampant inequality. For most of the “regular folks,” there was a major shift from livelihoods on small family farms or independent shops to wage labor. It was the period where businesses combined to form huge “trusts,” which allowed regionally dominant businesses to merge across state lines. The enlargement of trusts created the American Gilded Age and prompted passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.  This was more than a matter of money and raging inequality, but presented a threat to democracy itself, as the voices of regular people were increasingly unable to be heard in the halls of Congress that had been captured by big money.

The Progressive Populist movement pushed forward trust busting (the Sherman Act), reform of government corruption and cronyism (the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883), and the labor union movement. Although the Progressives themselves were not directly responsible for violence, violence and unrest frequently appeared around labor strikes. Like today, while the mainstream press often blamed the striking workers, later investigations found that it was often created by Pinkertons (a vigilante law enforcement group hired by the industrialists) or federal and state national guard troops responding to requests to defend factories.

More recent examples of American populism are represented by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Although these movements are frequently portrayed as opposites, in their early days they sometimes were described as two sides of a very angry coin. Both were motivated to some degree by the government bailout of Wall Street and big banks during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, while the pain of Main Street and working people was ignored. Although both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street started as grass roots response to injustices against “the people,” the Occupy movement faded out due to lack of organization and resources. Conversely, the Tea Party movement morphed into something much more organized and better funded—including the support of right-wing billionaires.

Throughout American history, various groups have been demonized: Abolitionists, Mormons, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, African-Americans and other peoples of color, immigrants, bankers and intellectuals. We can intuit that the demonization of the latter (bankers and intellectuals) came from the ground up, whereas other forms of demonization were likely more generalized. Anti-intellectualism is a common element of populism in America.

Some of us remember former Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s calling students protesting the Vietnam War “effete snobs.” The intellectual is portrayed as someone who is content to live a life of the mind, safely ensconced within the Ivory Tower and immune from the hard work and exempt from fighting wars that all the rest of “us” must do. The intellectual is stereotypically described as enjoying an unearned social superiority while contributing nothing of real value to the rest of society. Intellectuals are the ones who live in an abstract world of spreadsheets and data, who jet off for meetings in fancy places like Davos, where they make decisions resulting in lost jobs and shuttered factories.

In modern times, the buzzwords are “meritocracy” and “professionalism,” along with their messages that only those with requisite (usually expensive) training and degrees are qualified to make certain decisions. We can sympathize with populist arguments that “elites” were behind policies (e.g., globalized trade and rapid technological change) that made a few very wealthy while destroying jobs and impoverishing the communities that were left out of the decisions.

In real life, however, the targets of anti-intellectualism are not always so easy to identify.  Typical non-Wall Street targets are higher-level public administrators and university professors. Although public administrators can be co-opted by the managerial ethos (get more work out of everyone for less), they are also public servants—most who genuinely want to see their work make a difference and improve communities. Likewise, many university professors genuinely want to improve the future through their students, and they often share the angst of their working-class neighbors—managing larger classes with fewer resources and constantly under threats from “the Administration.” Or state legislatures. Indeed, professional-level workers are increasingly subject to many of the same forms of inferiorization typically experienced by blue-collar workers. 

While “bottom-up” driven populist anti-intellectualism is usually based on legitimate grievances (and may sometime serve to advance democratic ideals), todays anti-intellectualism is a top-down driven version with entirely different roots and purposes: Oil and gas companies deny climate change, the corporatocracy and the wealthy promote “trickle down” economics, notwithstanding all the evidence that it doesn’t work as they claim. This form of anti-intellectualism allows them to whip up the working class against “intellectual elites.” Which, remarkably, never includes the well-paid white-paper “researchers” at their own posh think tanks.

 

At some point, rabid anti-intellectualism morphs into anti-science, anti-evidence, and denial of reality. The propaganda machine has been pushing policies (anti-regulation, anti-wealth-tax, anti-union, anti-education) that either harms regular working people directly or disempowers them in some way.  Relentless propaganda, combined with the defunding of public education, has resulted in loss of critical thinking skills among working and middle-class populations. Most people are already working too many hours to have time to educate themselves on all the issues—if they are even inclined to do so in a culture that disparages learning. Add on top of this the constant media barrage of glamorous and exciting lifestyles of the “rich and famous” juxtaposed against one’s own drab and shabby life, and you have a recipe for mass cognitive dissonance.

In a world where everyone is exhorted to view everyone else as competition for increasingly fewer resources (good jobs, housing, opportunity, recognition), anti-intellectualism creates another form of “us versus them.” Universities and research groups are working to make education more accessible as well as to bridge the divide between academia and the “real world.” At the same time, both oligarch-funded and organic social media hate propaganda machines have made intellectuals defensive. Feeling themselves under attack, some academics and intellectuals respond by expressing disdain for the ignorant masses, perpetuating the cycle of hate and distrust. 

It’s Official! America is an Oligarchy

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

OK, the findings in one study do not necessarily make anything official. But this is a joint study by political science professors from Princeton University and Northwestern University with numerous publications to their credit.  Moreover, it more or less corroborates what many of us have suspected for years—our government no longer represents “we the people.”  This is not just a problem with elected officials, but extends to broader social structures that operate to keep the voice and concerns of regular working people unheard on policy agendas.  More people are becoming aware of this, and frustration on both the left and the right has resulted in the anti-establishment movements known as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

Political scientists describe the process of how policy is formulated, developed, and eventually adopted through three broad basic models. The first model is majoritarian pluralism. This is the “majority rules” model that most of us learn in school.  Indeed, the founding fathers were rightly concerned about the possibility of mob rule, political chaos and “tyranny of the majority,” and so they designed a system of government based on separation of power, checks and balances. This created a conservative bias, which means that all else being equal, it is harder to institute change than to maintain the status quo. The second model, interest-group pluralism, proposes that policy influence is brought about by competition between organized interest groups.  Because these groups have organization and resources, they are better able to develop expertise on a particular issue as well as create an infrastructure where their voices are heard by policymakers.  Both the majoritarian pluralism and the interest-group pluralism model predict that political candidates will tailor their policy platforms to accommodate as many of the competing viewpoints as they are able, thus policy results tend to represent some reasonable manifestation of the preferences of the “average” citizen.

Thomas Dye is a modern advocate of what has come to be known as elite theory. Dye is the author of The Irony of Democracy,  Top-Down Policymaking, Politics in America, and Who’s Running America among other publications on the same issue. In a nutshell, elite theory proposes that: (1) society is divided into the few who have power and the many who do not, (2) the few who govern are not typical of the masses who are governed, (3) elites share consensus on the basic values of the social system and the preservation thereof, (4) public policy is set by, and reflects the demands of, prevailing elites and is imposed downward on the masses and (5) the masses are relatively apathetic and exert little direct influence on elites and their policies.  A corollary of elite theory which combines it with interest group pluralism is biased pluralism. Biased pluralism predicts that it is elite groups—corporations, professional associations, think tanks, chambers of commerce—rather than elite individuals who have the greatest influence on policy.

In the Princeton study, the professors developed an updated analytical model to test the predictive validity of these four political models. First, they identified 1,779 distinct “policy cases” that represented an identifiable policy change and a clearly defined dichotomous “pro/con” response.  They also collected surveys of policy preferences based on respondents’ income level (at the tenth, fiftieth, and ninetieth percentiles).  Prior studies had suggested that each of the aforementioned models had some degree of predictive validity. In this study, the professors used more complex analytics to better parse out some of the confounding variables in the prior studies.  For example, there are cases in which the preferences of average citizens and the preferences of elites are highly correlated.  In such cases, ordinary citizens might appear to “win” on a policy issue, when they have simply been coincidental beneficiaries of elite lobbying.  Alternatively, the general public tends to be more divided on particular “hot button” issues such as abortion and gun control, while elites tend to be more united.  Consequently, in this study, the authors paid particular attention to policy issues on which elites and ordinary citizens disagreed.  The findings are summarized below:

1. When the preferences of elites (wealthy individuals) and net interest-group alignments is held constant, the preferences of the general public have virtually no effect on policy. The authors conclude that “empirical support for Majoritarian Pluralism looks very shaky, indeed.” What this means is that the democratic principles upon which our country was founded no longer apply.

2. Organized interest groups as a whole have a “very substantial and independent impact” on policy. However, when the authors computed separate net-interest-group alignment for business-oriented and mass-based groups, the influence coefficients for the business groups was nearly twice as large as that for the mass groups.  This is due to both the numerical advantage of business interest groups as well as the fact that (unlike the general public) they are rarely on opposite sides of an issue, particularly economic issues.  In essence, the model generally supports interest group pluralism, with the caveat that in the U.S., interest groups are “heavily tilted toward corporations, businesses, and professional associations.”   Moreover, the alignments of these groups are negatively correlated with the preferences of average citizens.

3. The elite theory model also performed well, and the authors suggest that it probably understates the political influence of elites.  For one thing, their data captured preferences in the top 10 percent, but they could not state with specificity how much of this was due to the top 1%, the top one-tenth of 1%, or the more numerous individuals around the 90th percentile. Also, economic elites tend to occupy positions of influence (high social standing and high-level positions in institutions), from which they can work to shape and shift the preferences of others lower in the hierarchy.

4. Finally, the authors examined the effects of policy preferences on the status quo, with the assumption that it would be more difficult when the proposed policy requires the government to act or change something (the status quo bias). In these cases, even when an overwhelming majority (80%) of the public favors change, it is only successful about 43% of the time.  These results suggest a cumulative effect of policy that favors elites, as elite-favored policy tends to become more of the status quo with each passing year.  This phenomenon could also explain the compounding effects of income and wealth inequality, which has also been documented.

The authors conclude by stating, “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”  To which I respond, “Why are we not surprised?”

So what does all this mean for most of the rest of us?  There is some suggestion that if “we the people” could form a sufficient number of groups (with a sufficient number of members and resources) we might have a better chance. In essence, organization and mobilization is the key to being heard and impacting policy. But this takes effort, energy and organization, which many of us may not have because we are too busy simply surviving. Another practical problem is how to coordinate the efforts of already existing social change groups who are working on a multiplicity of unrelated or only tangentially related issues. In the non-profit world, the emphasis is on capacity-building and resilience  because—just like working people—many non-profits have to spend time, effort and resources just to manage their funding sources and cash flow, which makes less of this available to the servicing of their mission.  Moreover, non-profits who are dependent on mainstream foundation money may find themselves cut off if they advocate policy positions that are not acceptable to their wealthy funders.

Thus there appears to be a sort of catch-22: it takes organization to affect policy and it requires resources (time, energy, money) to get organized. So if organization presents too many logistical problems for ordinary citizens to effect significant change in policy, what are the alternatives?  Chris Hedges in his 2015 The Wages of Rebellion depicts a downward spiral of more vigorous public protests followed by increasingly forceful counter-resistance efforts and corresponding growth of the police and surveillance state, which will eventually lead to totalitarianism. Hedges argues that when the people have no voice or power in such an oppressive state, there is tantamount to a moral imperative for revolution. The American Declaration of Independence itself proclaims both the right and the duty of the People to alter or abolish any government (including the very one being created) when it becomes destructive of the life, liberty and happiness of its citizens.

So, if “we the people” are not being heard, we might just have to make a lot more noise.